Zentury Spotlight – October 2023 Spam Update Completed

Google October 2023 Spam Update Completed

As of October 20, Google has officially announced that the October 2023 Spam Update rollout has been completed. The update was first announced on October 4. 

Google states in its announcement that user feedback was the driving force behind the most recent spam update. Many users noticed that when they searched in their native tongues, there was an upsurge in spam results.

With the update to its spam detection features, Google aims to provide people throughout the world better search results.

Google uses both human and computer reviewers to find and remove spammy pages and websites.

SpamBrain is one such system that uses AI and machine learning to keep up with new spam strategies.

Google makes these kinds of adjustments on a regular basis to stay up to current with changing spam trends.

Google’s spam policies documentation lists forbidden practices, and some of them include:

• Text or links that are visible to search engines, but invisible to users.
• Content that is produced automatically, yet has little value added.
• Massive, unauthorized article scraping.
• Pages with too many distracting ads.
• Minimal affiliate content with a strong financial emphasis.
• “Doorway” pages and similar tactics to mislead search engines.
• False claims, and similar misleading and aggressive commercial tactics.

Google advises websites to concentrate on offering an open, truthful user experience. After spam updates, that should keep you safe.

Google Search Results Show A Steady Decline In SGE Responses

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), which was originally hailed as a ground-breaking generative AI feature set to reshape search engine result pages (SERPs), is noticeably reducing its impact in an unanticipated development.

The goal of SGE, which was launched as an experimental feature at Google Labs, is to revolutionize user interaction with search. 

With great excitement, Google launched SGE, positioning it as the direction of AI-assisted search in the future by employing generative AI to provide tailored and sophisticated responses to user searches.

The majority of tech critics gave it a favorable first impression and praised it. But there are questions about SGE’s decreased visibility in SERPs during the last few weeks.

The decreased frequency of SGE components in search results has also been confirmed by several SEO experts.

Industry insiders estimate that it may be the result of several things.

First, there’s the accuracy issue. Although SGE has demonstrated proficiency in producing responses, some contend that the calibre of these mechanized solutions may have lagged behind.

Additionally, there is the matter of public opinion. Users may find that human-crafted replies are more sophisticated and trustworthy than outcomes provided by AI.

Google hasn’t provided a clear reason for the reduced visibility of SGE in its SERPs, though, and has stayed silent.

Even while it’s too soon to bid SGE goodbye, its declining visibility is a phenomenon that has to be watched closely.

Google Shares Its Opinion On The “Hostload Exceeded” Issue With Indexing

Over the weekend, users were confused by Google Search Console’s ambiguous warning and the website’s inability to be indexed. The message that appeared to users was, Failure: hostload exceeded.

Many publishers consulted their web hosts after discovering that the issue was not with the web host. The next assumption was that the problem was on Google’s side. Google’s John Mueller contributed to solving the puzzle. 

An update said that the problem had been found, and by Saturday the following day, the event had been declared fixed.

However, a lot of people still claimed that the problem with the search console wasn’t resolved.

It’s evident that several web hosts are involved in this problem.

Additionally, the issue is unrelated to bandwidth or crawling problems at the web server, despite some people’s suggestions to the contrary.

Everyone affirmed that the web host was not the source of the issue.

It eventually became apparent why so many people were having problems with indexing.

Mueller’s explanation implies that those who are having issues with hostload exceeding are sending in an excessive number of URLs.

When there is a quality problem with a webpage, Google generally refuses to index it.

Mueller refrained from mentioning quality as a problem.

However, another user pointed out that they haven’t been organically indexed since the core update, suggesting that there may be a quality problem for some users.

Google Will Start Testing Chrome’s IP Protection Privacy Feature

Google is going to test a new IP Protection feature for Chrome users to protect their identities online as part of a gradual deployment to address customer privacy concerns.

IP protection, which was first unveiled as “Gnatcatcher,” aims to conceal users’ true IP addresses by directing their internet traffic over privacy proxies.

The main goal is to limit cross-site monitoring and protect personal identities online.

Concerns about covert tracking methods—which utilize IP addresses to identify users without their knowledge or consent—have grown, leading to the introduction of IP protection.

This feature is a part of Google’s larger effort to create a comprehensive privacy ecosystem that balances user privacy concerns with the security and operation of the internet.

Initially, users must choose to use this functionality by signing in.

Once activated, IP Protection will track user activity by focusing on particular domains.

IP Protection Phase 0 testing would only include Google-owned domains and IP addresses situated in the United States, according to reports from Bleeping Computer.

New Update on Google Bard Enables It to Summarize More Emails

This week, Google unveiled a number of updates to enhance the functionality of Bard, their brand-new AI chatbot in development.

The modifications are intended to improve Bard’s utility for content creation and workflow management.

Using the Workspace Extension in Gmail, Bard may now deliver rapid updates by summarizing many emails at once. Additionally, it is now better able to comprehend requests for recent email summaries.

Images shared in Bard discussions are accessible to the people with whom the user is sharing them. Others can carry on the conversation with their own Bard exchanges thanks to this context-giving and creative spark.

Recently, Google made it possible for English-speaking users to let Bard search, summarize, and respond to queries by interacting with their Gmail, Docs, and Drive information. According to Google, access to user data can be disabled at any moment and will not be utilized for training Bard’s public model.